Consistency Removes Genesis I Problems

If God created the earth and if He described what He did in
Genesis, why does the evidence not fit the Genesis account? The fact
is that it does! The problem is that human beings misinterpret both
records because of their preconceived ideas. Mankind tends to decide
what they want to believe and then bend, distort, and twist what they
read and observe to fit what they have all ready determined to be true.
Sometimes called "the universal rule of graduate work," the situation
is described as "make sure your data conforms to your conclusions."
We have seen it used in studies of breast cancer, in the cigarette
company's studies of the effects of smoking, and in all kinds of
government evaluations of everything from presidents to the ecological
studies of desert fish.

When considering the Genesis account, we find two groups who
tend to be especially guilty of this "universal rule of graduate work."
One group is the atheist who starts with the presupposition that
Genesis cannot possibly be right because it is religious in nature. This
view assumes that ignorance and religious superstition so dominates
the Genesis account that whatever it says, it has to be wrong. With
such a viewpoint, the most bizarre and ridiculous interpretation of a
biblical word or phrase is always taken, no matter what violence that
interpretation does to the context of the passage. The second group is
the denominationalist who has accepted a particular religious viewpoint
as to what, how, and when God has done the creating. All
biblical statements are forced into the framework that the tradition of
their denomination has established no matter how much the wording
has to be distorted or ignored to make it fit the tradition.

To be honest, I have to admit that I too am guilty of interpreting
the Genesis record in a way that fits my preconceived idea of what
must (in my opinion) be true. I stated this viewpoint at the start of this
article. It is my conviction that science and faith in God are symbiotic
viewpoints--mutually advantageous and supportive of one another.
I maintain that the God of the Bible did the creating and then told us
about it in His Word. The skeptic may respond by saying, "Boy,
you're going to have to do a lot of distorting and twisting to do that!"
My response to that charge is that all I have to do is use the words given
in Genesis consistently and not add anything to what is said. When
I do those two things, I find the two records agree in every checkable
detail.

An example of this principle is the description of the early
condition of land and sea in Genesis 1:9-10:

And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered
together into one place and let the dry land appear.

There are obviously a numher of possible interpretations that could he
made of this statement. Some of them are preposterous scientifically.
I have heard people propose that waters were a vault or canopy above
the earth and that the land was under this canopy. Other writers have
proposed that the waters produced soil and rock so the crust of the
earth was produced from water. The scientific problems of proposals
like these are enormous--caused by a preconceived idea of what
should have happened.

The Hebrew word translated "place" in this verse is the word
maqom--liteirally meaning "a place of standing." This word is used
literally hundreds of times in the Bible and it always refers to a specific
area or locality. It is never used to refer to a huge zone or region, but
is much more specific. The word "earth" comes from the Hebrew
word erets and refers to "something that people are living on, working
on, walking on, and using to carry on their daily activities." Here are
some uses of these two words:

"Unto the 'place' (maqom) of the altar..." (Genesis 13:4).
"...spare the 'place' (maqom) for the fifty..." (Genesis 18:24).
"...Abraham returned unto his 'place' (maqom)" (Genesis 18:33).
"And the 'earth' (erets) brought forth grass,..." (Genesis 1:12).
"...every thing that is in the 'earth' (erets) shall die" (Genesis 6:17).
"...famine was over all the face of the 'earth' (erets)..." (Genesis 41:56).

To be consistent with this kind of usage, what must we understand
Genesis 1:9-10 to be referring to? It seems difficult to escape the
concept that, at the time being referred to, the water of the earth was
in one place and the land was in another. There is nothing said or
implied that would lead us to believe that the water was in many places
or that there were many lands. I can remember being in a geology class
in which the professor castigated the Genesis account for stating that
there was one land mass and one body of water in the beginning. His
explanation was that the Bible writer only knew of one continent and
so he wrote from his own ignorance.

I am sure that the professor would not make that accusation today
because we now have compelling evidence that early in the earth's
history, there was a single land mass. The evidence is that convection
cells caused by heat differences have produced forces which have
broken the land masses apart and rafted them away from one another.
Using the Genesis words consistently eliminates any conflict and
produces an amazing symbiosis between the biblical account and the
scientific evidence.

Another example of the benefits of consistency in the use of words
in Genesis concerns the dinosaurs and the fossil record. In spite of a
constant barrage of fakes, mistakes, and exaggerations by religious
extremists, no evidence has been found supporting the notion that
hunnan and dinosaurs lived at the same time. The evidence leads to
just the opposite conclusion. looking at the animals described in
Genesis 1, a person has to deal with which of them might include the
dinosaurs. There have been several candidates, but most suggestions
do not work. The word translated "creeping thing" is the word remes
which refers to an animal close to the ground and was something the
ancient Israelites could eat (Genesis 9:1-3. The water creatures of
verses 20 and 21 certainly do not include the land-dwelling dinosaurs
or flying creatures like the pterodactyl. Probably the leading candidate
in Genesis 1 is the word behemah translated "cattle" in Genesis
1:24. An enlarged form of this word is found in Job 40:15. Can this
word include dinosaurs? How is it used elsewhere in the Bible?
Consider the following examples of uses:

It seems obvious that the word refers to cattle, to an ungulate. To force
this word to include a dinosaur or a pterodactyl or a duckbill platypus
is to do violence to consistent use of the word. Even attempts to find
dinosaurs as contemporary with man outside of Genesis run into the
same problem. The word leviathan used in Job 41:1, for example, is
used in Psalm 104:26 in reference to a "creature of the deep ocean"--
an environment which the dinosaurs did not inhabit in significant
numbers.

The conclusion of this kind of examination of Genesis leads us to
believe that the animals of Genesis were aninnals that Moses and the
Israelites were familiar with--not viruses, dinosaurs, pterodactyl,
platypuses, and the like. By taking this consistent use of these words,
we find we have eliminated the conflict that many see between the
scientific evidence and the biblical record. This approach also leads
to a number of theological implications and even doctrinal considerations.
A good example is the use of the word "church." There can
be no question that the word referred to people who were "called out"
of the world in passages like these:

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God
dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are (1 Corinthians
3:16-17).

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for
two, saith he, shall he one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one
spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but
he that committed fornication sinneth against his own body. What? know
ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which
ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price:
therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's (1
Corinthians 6:16-20).

And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the
temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and
walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people
(2 Corinthians 6:16).

What is being referred to in these passages is obviously the
people--those who are called out of the world and into a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ. How can we possibly then ever make
the interpretation that a building or a corporation is the church? We
can only do this if we assume the word means something different than
it does in its use in the passages we have cited. People have argued
about what can be in the church or by the church because they have
assumed that the church is brick and mortar instead of people. Similar
discussions have gone on about baptism, adultery, the Holy Spirit, and
a variety of other issues because of inconsistent uses and meanings of
words.

The second thing which we made reference to in the third
pararaph of this article was to not add anything to what is said in the
Genesis account. This has been an equally common problem in
people's misunderstanding of the Genesis record. The Bible has not
given a method of creation that God used to bring things into
existence. Some have felt that a theory like the Big Bang is a threat
to Genesis when, in reality, all it does is give away that what the Bible
describes as "the heaved up things" (shamayim in Hebrew translated
"heaven" in most translations) could have come to be. Well-educated
atheists hate the Big Bang theory because they know it assumes
creation. What exploded is not addressed by the theory.

Another exaanple is the question of the age of the earth and what
is on it. Many theologies give a very specific time reference to biblical
events. Some hold to a denominational view that the whole history of
this planet is divided into 1,000-year periods--the last of which is
believed to be the physical reign of Christ on earth. For this view to
be true, the earth's age has to be relatively young. Many views of the
book of Revelation put very specific restraints on the timing of
biblical events.

The fact is that, to establish any kind of a time reference for the
natural history of this planet, a variety of assumptions of the Bible
have to be made. These assumptions and the time limitations that
denominational views put on events in the Bible are what create the
conflicts with scientific evidence. Why not be silent where the Bible
is silent and refuse to allow denominational tradition and human
religious theories to create conflict with the scientific evidence?